If you recall the headlines atop my blog posts on impeachment over the last several months -- among them Whatever Happened To That Democratic Blue Wave?,Fuggedabout Trump: The Democratic Circular Firing Squad Goes After Obama, and most recently The Long, Tragicomic Slog Toward Impeachment -- you probably are onto my view that if Donald Trump goes down it will have less to do with House Democrats, whose extraordinary dithering continues apace, Continue Reading...

At my college, the semester just started. And in my classes, as usual, I have an array of students from other countries, including Syria and Lebanon. I have said on other occasions that my Middle Eastern students are almost always some of the best, hardest-working, least-complaining ones. It's just an anecdotal observation based on years of experience, but make of that what you will. In my classes, we read literature that has a political bent, Continue Reading...

With an intact gag reflex and so much else on our deeply troubled planet to write about, I have been fighting the urge to wade back into the beyond sordid saga of former Donald Trump fuck buddy and pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, whose escape acts from justice would seem to rival the Great Houdini's until you consider that the legendary illusionist's feats of a century ago were not aided and abetted by a cast of powerful, Continue Reading...

After Donald Trump was inaugurated, I heard dozens of predictions about how soon he would fall and be forced out of the presidency. I talked to people In The Know or people who would mention a friend who's an intelligence agent, and they all knew, with near certainty, that we were mere months from the wheels of justice and the righteous government of the United States rejecting Trump like he was a dog's arm grafted onto our precious human bodies. Continue Reading...

We are not exactly sports fanatics, my love and I.  While I nominally follow the Philadelphia Phillies, at least when they're winning, we don't even have cable TV, so we bypass the 24/7 torrent of the sports industrial complex in a sort of insular bliss at the mountain retreat if you don't count the nightmare than Donald Trump has visited upon us.  But we are joyfully following the U.S. national women's team in the World Cup because it allows us Continue Reading...

If you ever happen to find yourself in Waskom, Texas, a tiny burg across the Louisiana state line off I-20, a place best described as "twister bait," you might wanna head on over to the Great American Mural that covers the front of the We Buy Houses 123 building in the middle of town. It's a mighty huge thing, what with its portrayal of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in a dull, gray New York City; an extraordinarily masculine Statue of Continue Reading...

The damage inflicted by Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. - John McCain  Although it is equal parts presumptuous and wishful thinking, I'm going to suggest that the hidden message of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's farewell soliloquy was that he believes Congress should impeach Donald Trump because the damage cited by the president's late nemesis -- yeah, the guy whose naval Continue Reading...